Montenegrin soldiers on Corfu

The British chronology of the war records under 16 February 1916 that the remnants of the Montenegrin army landed on Corfu. Three days earlier the Allies had notified Greece of their transfer. It has not been possible to establish how many Montenegrins arrived on the island or who commanded them. The available sources indicate, however, that it was a small group, not comparable with the Serbian army of more than 100,000 men assembling on Corfu.

The Montenegrins who reached the island were among the few who did not want to lay down their arms. After the fall of Lovćen and Cetinje the army of Nicholas I fell apart, and on 25 January its representatives signed terms of capitulation with the Austrians. Most of the soldiers went home. The British official history of operations in Macedonia states plainly that the Montenegrins did not need rescuing, because their army wanted nothing so much as to go home. Some of the officers ended up in Austro-Hungarian internment camps. Those who wanted to fight on made their way through to Albania and, together with the Serbs, went along the coast to the evacuation ports. The London weekly The Near East wrote on 18 February that the Serbian army was being rebuilt on Corfu “together with those refugees from Montenegro who are still available”. The Allies nevertheless stressed that it was not only Serbs who had been taken off from Albania. When the Italians were leaving Durrës at the end of February, an official communiqué issued in Rome on 26 February announced that the evacuation of Serbian, Montenegrin and Albanian troops from Albania had been completed.

The King was in Italy at the time and did not recognise the capitulation. He then went to France, first to Lyon, and on 8 March, according to a Reuters dispatch, arrived with the Queen and his family in Bordeaux, where his government also settled. Unlike the Serbian government on Corfu, which was rebuilding its army, Nicholas I no longer had any troops. Montenegrins later fought on the Salonika front, but in the ranks of the Serbian army, which was also joined by volunteers from among Montenegrin emigrants overseas. The King was reluctant to see them recruited, because he opposed plans to unite Montenegro with Serbia.